How understandable that most of our beliefs protect us from the danger of being an individual. “Think of others” we were once taught. “Adapt, adapt” we are now told. But it is a coward cry, for he who after cruel buffeting wins to aloneness learns that life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness. Some uncomprehended law holds us at a point of contradiction where we have no choice, where we do not like that which we love, where good and bad are inseparable partners impossible to tell apart, and where we—heart-broken and ecstatic, can only resolve the conflict by blindly taking it into our hearts. This used to be called being in the hands of God. Has anyone any better words to describe it?
The opposition between the individual and the mass must be the very ground of evolution. The individual pushing his way forward, blind with insight, glad to face any risk at all. If the mass was a whit less leaden what a danger the individual could be. The individual afire with untested creativity, the mass the weight that tests the strongest. No wonder hate is engendered here.
It is better not to look for love’s part in case love proves to be only the relief of losing oneself in a crowd of two. But hate comes with disagreement. If you are said to be in the wrong, then you are convinced a wrong has been done you, and you must fight in self-defence; for to be wrong in the eyes of others feels as though you had been destroyed. To test truth here could be the death of the collective man in you, so it could also be the point at which you found yourself. This must be the fear that is the first food of hate. The fear of discovering who you are, of putting your uniqueness to the test.
Must each of us come out of the crowd, the crowd in us, stand opposed, risk existence or non-existence, apart from the mass? What birth is as painful as this, a birth that may be a death, but may also be one’s holy gift to one’s fellows.
There is a special hate threatening now, when a sameness is being enforced on us, and we feel the impulse to fight for our difference. Should we fight this impulse and find a way of conforming, or should we fight all the rest in a refusal to conform? We are basically much the same, we need to feel with others. Yet it must be the very pulse of life that makes each mount on the shoulder of the next, trampling on those who would trample on him, forcing them below, for how can anyone be above if others are not below? Must one lose face, gain status, test oneself, measure oneself—is all this the rudimentary stage of becoming an individual, and is it the price paid for having left the safety of the crowd?
Fool that I am, I worry at the combat of life like a dog with an old shoe. It is differentiation in action, it is what the competitive nature of man forces him to do whether he will or no. It is the creation of quality, good and bad. Most women only half understand it and they tend to dislike it, for they feel the human price is too high. It is high. Good may lose and bad may win. The public view and the private differ. It could make unexpected history if wives wrote what they saw work—its efforts and its achievements—doing to their husbands; telling honestly how much of the husband is left for human purposes and how good the human quality remains.
My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone. The others must vanish into their expected role.
All those who through history have helped life to enlarge, to diversify—at their peril, always at their peril—have been strongly individual; above all the greatest, who was more than man. If more and more of us accept the task of living our individual fate, if we accept being woman, man, withdrawn or all-managing, of this race or that, and make of it completeness, encompassing all the nobilities and humiliations of which we alone are capable, then what self-respect we could develop, what cause we could have for paying respect to one another, to exchange courtesy and compassion. It must have been just this slow development of honour and humility that has given us, through time, the heart to go on. Perhaps many think that life is so difficult that we could not do more than we are doing, and they would scorn me as someone who bewails human quality.
They could be right. I dislike much in myself, and much in humanity, and believe half of life, a constantly shifting half, to warrant dislike. But if life is the tension between the opposites and has to be just as it is, I still marvel that it has to be quite so bad. But I judge what I half create, for it is my eyes and my tastes that make my world. It is my creation and concept that I have to inhabit. Here, just here, is the price of individuality. I assume that I made my world out of what life offered, but my innate quality must have drawn it towards me. I fused it all together only half knowing what I did. What felt at moments like the white heat of necessity was much my own doing, and it may have been a wrong-headed effort. I shall never know. No one can enter my world, nor can I enter the world of those I know best; we can pay visits in the entrance hall, and keep our eyes unfocussed. We can exchange gifts. Oh we can do that. We can offer our flowers of humility, appreciation and need, only asking that a meeting ground (that precious place) be kept open.
I used to find it difficult to talk to people newly met. Speech felt precipitate. A silent knowing should come first, sitting, smiling, holding hands, dancing perhaps without words, but talking is too committal for a beginning. I had one friend who always carried some small objects of interest in his pocket, and on occasion would show them; the skull of an asp, seed pods of rare shape. These made speech easy.
Another day to be filled, to be lived silently, watching the sky and the lights on the wall. No one will come probably. I have no duties except to myself. That is not true. I have a duty to all who care for me—not to be a problem, not to be a burden. I must carry my age lightly for all our sakes, and thank God I still can. Oh that I may to the end. Each day then, must be filled with my first duty, I must be “all right”. But is this assurance not the gift we all give to each other daily, hourly?
I wonder if we need be quite so dutiful. With one friend of my own age we cheerfully exchange the worst symptoms, and our black dreads as well. We frequently talk of death, for we are very alert to the experience of the unknown that may be so near and it is only to those of one’s own age that one can speak frankly. Talking of one’s health, which one wants to do, is generally full of risks. Ill health is unpleasant to most healthy people as it makes them feel helpless, threatened, and it can feel like an unjustified demand for sympathy. Few believe in the pains of another, and if the person in pain has nothing to show, can forget the pain when interested, then where is the reality of it? In one’s self, where it ought to be kept I suppose. Disabilities crowd in on the old; real pain is there, and if we have to be falsely cheerful, it is part of our isolation.
Another secret we carry is that though drab outside—wreckage to the eye, mirrors a mortification—inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable. In silent, hot rebellion we cry silently—“I have lived my life haven’t I? What more is expected of me?” Have we got to pretend out of noblesse oblige that age is nothing, in order to encourage the others? This we do with a certain haughtiness, realising now that we have reached the place beyond resignation, a place I had no idea existed until I had arrived here.
It is a place of fierce energy. Perhaps passion would be a better word than energy, for the sad fact is this vivid life cannot be used. If I try to transpose it into action I am soon spent. It has to be accepted as passionate life, perhaps the life I never lived, never guessed I had it in me to live. It feels other and more than that. It feels like the far side of precept and aim. It is just life, the natural intensity of life, and when old we have it for our reward and undoing. It can—at moments—feel as though we had it for our glory. Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times—though this comes rarely, unexpectedly—it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved. It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness w
hich lies outside activity, and which when young we are too busy to experience.
I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth—a morsel—and you. You went through those long years when it was pain to be alone, now you have come out on the good side of that severe discipline. Alone you have your own way all day long, and you become very natural. Perhaps this naturalness extends into heights and depths, going further than we know; as we cannot voice it we must just treasure it as the life that enriches our days.
Impossible to speak the truth until you have contradicted yourself. Although I am absorbed in myself, a large part of me is constantly occupied with other people. I carry the thought of some almost as a baby too poorly to be laid down. There are many whom I never cease cherishing. I dwell on their troubles, their qualities, their possibilities as though I kept them safe by so doing; as though by understanding them I simplified their lives for them. I live with them every minute. I live by living with them. I dwell with the essence of friends so intensely that when they arrive I can be paralysed by the astonishing opacity of their actual presence.
We old people are short tempered because we suffer so. We are stretched too far, our gamut is painfully wide. Little things have become big; nothing in us works well, our bodies have become unreliable. We have to make an effort to do the simplest things. We urge now this, now that part of our flagging bodies, and when we have spurred them to further functioning we feel clever and carefree. We stretch from such concerns as these into eternity where we keep one eye on death, certain of continuity, then uncertain, then indifferent.
We cannot read the papers with the response of those younger. We watch the playing for place in great issues, we hear war rumble, and we who have lived long still feel the wounds of two wars endured. We remember the cost; the difference in mood at the beginning of a war and at the end of a war. The initial pride that forbids man to accept an affront and later, when the immeasurable has been accepted by all, the dumb sense of wrong done by all to all. So the old are past comment and almost past reaction, still knowing pity, but outside hope; also knowing—Oh here is the thing we cannot face again—that when man is set on a goal, destruction is nothing to him.
When a new disability arrives I look about to see if death has come, and I call quietly, “Death, is that you? Are you there?”. So far the disability has answered, “Don’t be silly, it’s me.”
The crucial task of age is balance, a veritable tightrope of balance; keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. On the day when we can boast none of this, we must be able to wait until the balance is restored. When we sink to nothingness we must remember that only yesterday our love was warm. I believe, indeed I know, that for some people life lights a flame on the right shoulder, an accolade that may be for courage shown; when you are young the flame can leap because there is much life to be lived, and much need of fortitude. It can only burn faintly in age, but it may still be there. The old can supply little ardour, just the small amount we manage to create each day by our careful balancing. The flame may be unsteady but it can be clear, for it is still the greatness of being alive.
I must be explicit. The first dream I took to an analyst, many years ago, showed the three tall windows of his consulting room, windows almost from ceiling to floor. Outside them cosmic light streamed down. As this light is known, but no one knows what it is, there is no true name to give it. It is opaque light, very alive, moving, overpowering, and sparkling like a juicy apple when you bite deep.
It flowed down past the windows and I stood naked, barely able to endure the marvel. Then as I sought shelter in the embrasure between two of the windows a small flame sprang to life on my right shoulder, and I knew it was an accolade.
If that happened to me, it has happened to others, and I take it as a fact of human experience.
In the landscape of the impersonal there is always the loved individual. The individual is there and loved, but this may sharpen the pain for the old. It is the long stretch of time that gives us our viewpoint. We have watched generation follow generation, and we see the same qualities in grandparents, parents, and children working the same sad havoc. We saw the same wounds we see now caused in a like manner long ago. We would like to warn and teach, but we have learned that it is almost useless. In the course of our lives we have amassed too much data for sharp sorrow; and if we have just as much reason for pity to have dulled, who wants pity? So how carry it?
Always, through everything, I try to straighten my spine, or my soul. They both ought to be upright I feel, for pride, for style, for reality’s sake, but both tend to bend as under a weight that has been carried a long time. I try to lighten my burden by knowing it, I try to walk lightly, and sometimes I do, for sometimes I feel both light and proud. At other times I am bent, bent.
This morning when I woke and knew that I had had a fair night, that my pains were not too bad, I lay waiting for the uplifting moment when I pull back the curtains, see the sky, and I surprised myself by saying out loud: “My dear, dear days.”
Personal immortality may not matter at all. Perhaps our long insistence on it has been our need of spiritual value, and a groping conviction that this is our central truth; that we have a share in impersonal greatness. We belie it daily, but is it not possible that by living our lives we create something fit to add to the store from which we came? Our whole duty may be to clarify and increase what we are, to make our consciousness a finer quality. The effort of one’s entire life would be needed if we are to return laden to our source.
We may well fear that we will bring too small a gift, that we garner little. But are we fit judges, and out of travail and ignorance and loss, may we not create a kernel of gold that we dare not know, but which will be claimed?
I must ask myself, “What have I to become immortal? Not my beloved ego, none of that. And the spirit in us that is truly there, is that not already immortal?” Some rare people may have a special role to play, and they may remain themselves after death, but how worthy of immortality are most of us? We have to believe we have value, we could not have courage otherwise, and our sense of being more than ourselves is our most precious possession. It is in honour of this feeling that we endure and try. Even the most meagre life will have a wealth of patience, a treasure of endurance, immeasurable courage and cheer, and kindness culled from laborious days, and these are surely gifts worthy of return.
Age is a desert of time—hours, days, weeks, years perhaps—with little to do. So one has ample time to face everything one has had, been, done; gather them all in: the things that came from outside, and those from inside. We have time at last to make them truly ours.
When I was a child I went with my grandfather when he hunted wild turkey, or quail, driving through the roadless woods under great water oaks shining as though newly washed by rain. Once on reaching a river I jumped from the waggon and running into the deep shade sat down on a large alligator, taking it for a half-buried log. I was also the child who walked out on a plank placed as a pier to reach the centre of the dark pool, then knelt, plunged in her hands to scoop up a drink, and saw that fatal snake, a water moccasin, dart between her closing hands.
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours: When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced, over?
Love opens double gates on suffering. The pain of losing good is the measure of its goodness. Parting is impoverishment. Reason gives no solace. The going away of someone loved is laceration. But courage, love, understanding, pity, sensitivity, all our glories almost break us. Then suffer. It is all I can do. But how carry it? Do not complain, much worse might come so easily. But I cannot just suffer, so I grope for a way of dea
ling with it, wondering how best to grasp it, searching for any insight that might help.
I know that bad as it seems for me, no good in it for me at all, the parting will bring new interest to those I am losing. I can do nothing—love and suffering are the same.
When I have looked at every side sorrow begins to be sorrow for the inscrutable sorrow of life. I sorrow over distance, just distance, with its power of annulling those far away. If I could only see far ahead, assess what will happen, but I can do nothing. So I ape a false cheer, and gradually my sorrow becomes a dumb facing of Fate, until sickened by acceptance I feel a change taking place. A hint comes of some melting or hardening—which is it?—and at last I reach an inner citadel where there is a wounded quiet, knowing strength.
Have I only given up protest and comment because I could not do less, or other? In that inner place, indefinable, but not an illusion, do I just capitulate? This may be so, must be so, but it feels otherwise. Perhaps near the core of our being—are we ever near that unknowable centre?—one is beyond pain and pleasure. Is it possible that we approach the place where they are one? Is this to say—“Thy will be done”?
Measure of My Days Page 2